Mansour Abbas, the leader of the Islamist Ra’am Party and a supporter of Israel’s governing coalition government, is a realist. Judging by two of his most recent comments, he has a sound appreciation of the political environment in Israel. Several days ago, at a conference in Tel Aviv sponsored by the Hebrew-language Globes newsmagazine, Abbas […]
In what amounted to a settling of accounts, some Holocaust survivors in postwar Poland tried to avenge the deaths of their loved ones by exacting punishment on Poles who murdered Jews. These survivors regarded revenge as a therapeutic sacred right and duty, said Polish historian Katarzyna Person in a zoom lecture earlier this month sponsored […]
Claudio Lomnitz’s ancestors were wanderers, as his book suggests. Lomnitz, a professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York City, has written a ruminative memoir about his family that will surely strike a chord with Jewish families that were forced to leave their ancestral homes in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th […]
Donald Trump, the ex-U.S. president, thinks he has a licence to spew nonsense. From his mouth of late have gushed out an astonishing number of statements divorced from reality. Last week, he lambasted Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Israeli prime minister, as an ingrate. Netanyahu offended Trump because he was performing his duty. He had the […]
Israel should exercise the greatest of caution and discretion as tensions between Russia and Ukraine grow over their increasingly bitter border dispute. Under no circumstances should Israel allow itself to be harpooned into this potentially destabilizing and dangerous conflict currently simmering in eastern Ukraine. Ukraine, a former republic of the now-defunct Soviet Union, declared independence […]
The philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965) never deviated from his belief that dialogue is an essential component of human existence. A cosmopolitan bridge builder, he devoted his life to two interrelated goals — reconciliation between people and universal peace. It is hardly coincidental that he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize seven times. Buber’s quest forms […]
Known as the Angel of Death, he was the personification of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime and the embodiment of the Holocaust. Josef Mengele, a minor yet haunting figure in Nazi culture, was a German physician who cold-bloodedly determined the fate of new Jewish arrivals at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland and who conducted cruel […]
It was a milestone in the annals of Israel’s bilateral relations with the Arab world. On December 13, Naftali Bennett became the first Israeli prime minister to visit the United Arab Emirates. It is one of four Arab countries that agreed to normalize relations with Israel under the diplomatic umbrella of the 2020 Abraham accords, […]
Sean Baker’s bittersweet movie, Red Rocket, provides viewers with an unimpeded glimpse of flyover territory in the United States. It unfolds in Texas City, a somnolent, flyblown town in Texas hemmed in by highways and a railway track and dominated by the belching smokestacks of chemical refineries humming day and night ceaselessly. It’s an alienating […]
Donald Trump has bared his soul in a series of remarkably candid interviews with the Israeli journalist Barak Ravid. Sounding a lot like a spurned lover, the ex-U.S. president blasted Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Israeli prime minister, with whom he forged a close political relationship. Still smarting from his resounding defeat at the hands of […]